Category: Music

Blurred Lines in More Ways Than One – Part I

In what may be the most aptly named copyright case in recent history, “Blurred Lines” (properly Williams v. Gaye) is generally viewed as a mistake that many composers and songwriters fear will have a chilling effect on the craft of music-making. The headline complaint is that the outcome thus far asserts copyright protection for musical style, and, if true, this would certainly be harmful to the promotion of expression.

As attorney and law professor Rick Sanders opines in his blog, this case has such an unusual fact pattern—he calls it a perfect storm—that it may not be quite the precedent many fear. This opens up a much broader discussion about the legal processes for finding infringement, which I’ll do my best to summarize Part II.

To recap, in 2015, a jury awarded the Marvin Gaye estate $5.3 million in damages plus a 50% share in all future sales of the Robin Thicke/Pharrell Williams song “Blurred Lines,” finding that it infringed Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give it Up.” Last month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied a retrial, and counsel for Williams and Thicke last week filed for an en banc rehearing. Attorney Kathleen M. Sullivan notes in her brief that California’s Ninth Circuit is the “nerve center of the Nation’s creative industries,” thus its rulings on copyright are of particular significance.

In her appeal, Sullivan leans substantially on the district court’s failure to conduct proper analysis before “Blurred Lines” was presented to a jury. She writes …

“… the district court’s failure to make an objective comparison of the works before proceeding to  jury trial resulted in a trial where the jury was subjected to a mystifying haze of musicological obfuscation in which the Gayes’ expert found “implied” musical elements that were not notated in the lead sheet and ‘shift[ed] and invert[ed] the pitches’ in the songs in ‘a feat of musical gymnastics well beyond the skill of most listeners.’”

In part, Sullivan is quoting the strongly-worded dissent in the Ninth Circuit’s current holding, written by Judge Nguyen, which argued that the two songs are “objectively dissimilar.” In essence, the dissenting view argues that the district court should have been able to reach this conclusion as a matter of law and, thus, the case would never have gone to trial. Hence, Sullivan’s most quotable statement expressing the nature of concern among songwriters and composers …

“If a copyright holder can now get to a jury simply by proffering an expert to opine that a song’s elements are substantially similar to an accused song, without any objective comparison by the court, no musical work is safe from the prospect of copyright liability.”

Further, Sullivan asserts that the majority in the Ninth Circuit holding erred by applying a “broad” standard of protection to musical compositions. She states that this is both a contradiction of precedent and an error of law for two reasons: first, that no particular medium should be singled out for “broad” protection; and second, that the diversity of musical compositions may depend more than any other on “thin” copyright protection. “If anything, music is composed from indispensable, commonplace elements more often than other genres [she means categories] given that there are only 12 notes in the Western musical scale,” Sullivan writes.

That argument gets to the crux of the challenge in a case like Williams, especially because it went all the way to trial by jury, which is actually quite rare in copyright cases. In general, one does not need professional experience in law or music to know that all songwriters are working with the same set of common elements—notes, chords, time signatures, etc.—and that within any given musical genre, one work can sound a lot like a precedent work without the second actually copying the first.

Copyright is supposed to protect individual expressions but not ideas or facts; and in music, common elements, and even some standard arrangements of those elements, are generally viewed as ideas and facts (i.e. unprotectable). But when two musical works are quite similar, where does a court look for infringement; and even more unpredictably, how is a jury instructed to look for infringement?

As Rick Sanders states in his blog, what makes Williams most unusual was the fact that Robin Thicke so openly conceded that “Blurred Lines” was inspired by “Got to Give it Up.” This testimony feeds a doctrine known as the inverse-ratio rule, whereby the more one can prove the new artist had “access” to the precedent work, the less one must demonstrate similarity between the two works. More on this topic in the next post, but suffice to say that “access” is not generally easy to prove, and Thicke was an atypical witness by admitting that he was all but trying to mimic Marvin Gaye’s song. Add to this the evidence from the Gayes’ musicologist explaining the technical similarities between the two works, and the jury’s conclusion makes sense for us regular folks who can imagine being in their seats.

But for copyright attorneys and scholars, Williams v. Gaye actually touches several doctrinal nerves—namely that there is no uniform test for infringement; that the two main circuits (the Ninth and the Second) apply slightly different analyses; and that the process of testing for infringement in one medium, like literature, does not so easily apply to another medium, like music. All of this funnels into questions about what kind of evidence should be presented to a jury, or even whether it is rational—the Seventh Amendment notwithstanding—for juries to preside in copyright cases at all.

Based on the tone and rhetoric employed by the anti-copyright forces, I sense a bias that being pro-copyright is seen as equivalent to being pro-plaintiff in nearly all litigation. Whether that bias truly exists, I can say that I don’t personally know many copyright advocates who are pleased with the outcome in “Blurred Lines,” to say nothing of the composers and songwriters concerned that finding for the Gayes grants too broad a protection to elements that should be unprotectable.

Having said that, though, two scholars I admire greatly, Lateef Mtima and Sean O’Connor, take a very different view that the evidence presented in Williams is not only consistent with copyright law, but also represents an important reversal in a longstanding tradition of white musicians appropriating the musical styles of people of color. In an editorial for The Seattle Times, they write …

“While music copyright cases up to the mid-20th century often focused on catchy melodies, contemporary cases consider harmonic and rhythmic elements as well. The older view derived from a white, European — often ‘high brow’ — approach to music. This marginalized the influential harmonic and rhythmic innovations of artists of color from jazz on through rock and hip-hop. While black artists complained about these issues for decades, it is only when the tradition of white misappropriation of black musical innovation is threatened that the system comes under thunderous scrutiny.”

What Mtima and O’Connor are alluding to in a copyright context is the subjective aspect of testing for infringement; and this is where doctrine gets especially complicated, even without adding the emotional element of race to the narrative. Most copyright experts agree that infringement can occur beyond the scope of literal copying, and this generally translates into a doctrine of perception—i.e. how an ordinary listener, viewer, reader would perceive the allegedly infringing work. In theory, this is where a jury adds the element of justice into an otherwise subjective equation.

To Mtima and O’Connor’s point, in Williams, they see an important shift in understanding non-literal copying (i.e. Marvin Gaye’s style) and view this shift as resetting some balance in copyright protection for the contributions of people of color, which have unquestionably been commercialized by white artists. They state …

“The older focus on literal melodic copying systematically disfavored artists of color, Relying on this presumed exclusion of harmonic and rhythmic elements, record companies perennially promoted white artists from Elvis Presley to Iggy Azalea who could perform songs imitating artistic innovations of black artists.”

This is a fascinating line of inquiry from a historic, artistic, and social-justice perspective, though it may further muddy the waters, so to speak, in the broader debate as to how courts should test for infringement. Or perhaps it will provide a useful new context for settling some of these longstanding challenges. In a follow-up post, I’ll do my best to boil that debate down to a digestible narrative, but fair warning—it is a narrative with many blurry lines of its own.

Can Streaming Ever Work for Songwriters?

Yesterday, David Lowery’s The Trichordist published an article by singer/songwriter Blake Morgan—one which the Huffington Post apparently refused to run.  In the piece, Morgan describes meeting with Spotify executives to whom he tried to explain that their product isn’t Spotify itself but is in fact music.  “And by the way,” Morgan said, “stop calling your subscribers ‘users.’ They’re not ‘users,’ they’re listeners––our listeners in fact. You’re the ‘user.’ You’re using our music to monetize our listeners for your profit.”  This apparently confused and frightened the Spotify exec, who became defensive with an arrogance familiar to anyone who follows the internet industry. “You don’t get it at all!” the guy declared before leaving in a huff.

The night before reading Blake’s story, I met with a group of musicians in New York, and one songwriter showed up with a stack of papers in his hand. These were notices of intent (NOI) filed by a single entity on behalf of all the major streaming platforms for the purpose of obtaining compulsory licenses for use of dozens of the writer’s compositions. Based on reporting by Chris Castle, I wrote for the union publication Allegro back in March about major platforms doing this—using their overwhelming computing power to mass-file NOI, exploiting a loophole in Sec. 115 of the copyright law, in order to essentially blanket license all compositions for streaming platforms.  This living example of the songwriter with physical notices in hand hit home for me.  The songwriter explained that if he goes to the notice-sender’s website and fills out all the forms, there might be as much as $50 in it for him as compensation for thousands of streams of his work across multiple platforms.

American songwriters are unique among copyright holders because they are the only creative artists subject to a combination of compulsory license (i.e. anyone can use their work if they pay the license fee) and a consent decree, with roots in the early 20th century, whereby a federal rate court determines what the license fees will be for various uses, including public performances.  And because the average rate for a digital public performance is $0.005, this is why millions of streams are worthless to songwriters, despite the fact that streaming has largely displaced their other sources of revenue.

With Spotify poised to announce an IPO this year and make Daniel Ek and his colleagues even wealthier than they already are, a New Year’s Eve lawsuit with a price tag of $1.6 billion was filed by Wixen Publishing against Spotify for its unlicensed use of  hundreds of songs, including famous writers like Neil Young, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, and Donald Fagen.  The complaint alleges that 21% of the 30 million tracks on the platform are being used without mechanical licenses, and this number seems reasonable given the available anecdotal evidence and the grounds for previous litigation.

In the Lowery/Ferrick class-action suit for this same failure to license, Spotify’s defense amounted to claiming an intent to pay the license fees but for the lack of an efficient means to locate the songwriters due the royalties.  That suit settled for a modest $43 million fund, amounting to just a few dollars per infringement. Then, in response to a pair of lawsuits filed in September last year, Spotify came very close in its initial motion to asserting that streaming services were not even subject to mechanical licenses.  This drew immediate fire from the music world, notably National Music Publishers Association CEO David Israelite who said that Spotify was asking for a fight with “all songwriters.”

Fast-forward to the end of 2017, and the event that triggered Wixen’s 11th-hour litigation was the release just before Christmas of a draft bill titled the Music Modernization Act.  Sponsored by Representatives Doug Collins (R-GA) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the bill reflects about 4-5 years of legislative work trying to secure the interests of music-makers in the streaming market—even if, as Blake Morgan describes, the bros at the streaming companies don’t understand that they’re in the music business.

The MMA is endorsed by multiple music rights organizations, including NMPA, ASCAP, BMI, SONA, RIAA, A2IM, and several others.  The proposed legislation addresses a number of issues have long divided musicians and streaming platforms by creating a new digital licensing collective that has been compared to SoundExchange by some observers.  But the reason the bill triggered the Wixen lawsuit is that, if passed this year—and this seems feasible—the law would foreclose any new lawsuits over mechanical licensing infringements (including past infringements) because its core agreement is predicated on a blanket, compulsory license in exchange for an improved system of royalty distribution.

Key improvements include a new database funded by the digital platforms that would, in principle, more accurately identify and locate songwriters and composers to receive; and a new rate-setting process that is expected to raise the overall rates paid to songwriters.  Nevertheless, as written to date, the bill contains three areas of concern for songwriters. These have been publicly noted by Rick Carnes, CEO of the Songwriters Guild of America, though my understanding is that other parties share some of these concerns, and they will be raised as amendments to the bill are proposed in coming weeks and months. The issues Carnes raises are the following:

First, the immediate end of all litigation for past infringements seems to unfairly limit the remedy options for independent and small-publisher rights holders.  Carnes says he fully understands the need for a safe harbor in exchange for collective licensing going forward, but “why are songwriters who have seen their works infringed hundreds of thousands of times in the past having their right to sue for damages cut off arbitrarily on January 1, 2018?”

Second, the board overseeing this new digital licensing collective would currently comprise eight publisher representatives to two independent songwriter representatives.  Carnes argues that representation should be 50/50 just like the board overseeing SoundExchange.

Third, as written, the bill calls for royalties collected and held for songwriters who cannot be located to be distributed on a market-share basis, mainly to the major publishers. Carnes says that it is naturally the independent and small publishers who are most likely to fall through the cracks in the new system, which he describes as “enshrining” a longstanding problem even in old systems whereby music creators are often not properly compensated through royalty-collection practices.

Meanwhile, despite Spotify’s prominent role in this narrative, the reality is that YouTube is the most-visited platform for music streaming, and that platform pays a songwriter about ten percent of what Spotify pays (think $24 for a million plays), when it pays at all.  Presumably, any number of tracks a listener will “discover” on YouTube will be unauthorized uploads by users and are, therefore, outside the system that compensates artists even the paltry tip-jar money they’re due.  I mention this by way of saying the market itself remains volatile and dynamic, and we should be no more surprised to see Spotify suffer a Pandora-like fall from grace than to see it retain its dominant position.

I am hopeful that issues raised by Rick Carnes can be addressed as the Music Modernization Act moves through the process so that thousands of songwriters, whose names you’ll never know, can begin to benefit from the future of the digital music marketplace—whatever that future may look like. The bill certainly represents the first significant legislative attempt to make streaming work for musicians, but it would be an unfortunate irony if the independent voices—the ones who first advocated the democratization of the internet—were the ultimate losers going forward.  And we, as listeners, would lose as well.  Meanwhile, kudos to independent voices like Blake Morgan just for reminding the tech geeks with so many dollar-signs in their heads that without the music, movies, TV shows, etc. nobody would give a damn about their bloody apps.

Image by TurboMotion

American Identity is in the Music

My generation was raised on Schoolhouse Rock!. As such, we were not only told that America is a Melting Pot but were reminded of this on a regular basis in a song from that animated series, the melody of which is now ringing in the heads of any fellow Gen-Xers reading this post. Of course, the more mature truth is that America is not really a melting pot so much as it is a seething cauldron of incompatible ingredients that only manage to blend into something palatable after considerable simmer time. When The Great American Melting Pot episode first aired in May of 1976, it was just three months after violent race riots had broken out at a Florida high school over symbols celebrating the South in the Civil War.

In response to last weekend’s tragic events in Charlottesville, friends posted a number of comments and memes on Facebook contrasting the offense taken to NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem against the apparent dearth of outrage directed at Americans carrying Nazi flags in the streets. Granted, it’s hard to know the degree to which this particular hypocrisy really exists—I’d like to believe that most Americans across the political spectrum still denounce the waving of Nazi and Confederate flags in a violence-inciting, race-bating rally—but these allusions to the “Star Spangled Banner” resonate in context to the brewing clashes over nationalism and cultural identity. Kaepernick, who has now been joined by Michael Bennett of the Seattle Seahawks, has chosen an apt symbol of protest because the anthem is about as good an example as any of the distinction between American myth and American reality.

In 1991, playwright Tony Kushner sharply articulated America’s unique brand of hypocrisy in his AIDS-inspired play Angels in America when the gay, black character Belize says, “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate.”

It’s a brilliant line.

Of course, the “white cracker” Francis Scott Key wrote the word free 34 years after the English composer John Stafford Smith wrote the high G to which Kushner refers. In 1780, the note corresponded with the lyric Venus in the song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which was the official club song of the Anacreontic Society of London, a fraternity of mostly amateur musicians who would gather to enjoy concerts, drink, gossip, and drink more. As every American school kid is told, Key was moved to write the poem “Defence of Fort McHenry” upon seeing the flag still flying at dawn after heavy, overnight bombardment of the fort. Sung to the tune of “Anacreon in Heaven,” Key’s words would become the “Star Spangled Banner” but would not be adopted as the national anthem until 1931.

That the words of our anthem are American and the tune English—and the fact that they were paired during a war that is sometimes called the second revolution—reflects the fledgling creative voice of a new nation still writing its identity and still finding its place in the world. As the copyright critics love to say, “America is a pirate nation,” by which they usually refer to the fact that the book printers, shortly after independence, made a habit of pirating English books rather than pay to publish domestic authors. This is true. And had America remained a pirate nation rather than invest in its own creative capacity, the character of our society—and most likely our democracy itself—would be the worse for it. Because the voice that emerged, and which took nearly all of the nation’s first century to come into its own, is unambiguously multicultural, no matter what the bigots think. There is no such thing as “white male Christian” America, and there never was. Just listen to the music.

In fact, before “The Star Spangled Banner” became the official anthem by an act of Congress in 1931, the unofficial national song for many citizens and leaders was “America the Beautiful,” the lyrics of which are a poem written in 1893 by Katherine Lee Bates, a 19th century feminist who might have been gay. Conservative factions have occasionally lobbied for “God Bless America” as the national anthem because it places God in the center of the action, but this would provide little comfort to the kind of “conservative” on display in Charlottesville, since that song was written by a Russian immigrant jew named Israel (Irving) Berlin. (On a side note, Berlin also wrote “White Christmas,” and believe me, American Christmas celebrants would have precious little music to enjoy without Jewish songwriters.) Ironically enough, even though proposals from liberal groups to make the national song “This Land is Your Land” would be a non-starter, Woody Guthrie’s music is arguably the most American sound in the bunch. Though it is admittedly a bit jaunty for any kind of solemn occasion.

As students of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers understood that we would never get a seat at the grown-ups’ table of nations without fostering cultural and scientific enterprise, which was a pretty ambitious dream for a war-weary population of some three million farmers spread across an area of about 340,000 square miles. But what the hell? They had just won a revolution that should not have worked by any sane analysis and then sat down to write a user’s manual (a.k.a. the Constitution) for operating a society unlike any that had ever existed. Why not hope for great invention and art while they were at it? John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail dated May 12, 1780, expressed his hope for the country to attain intellectual and artistic stature thus:

“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

Adams’s implication that America’s progress toward maturity would be reflected in its capacity for increasingly refined creative and cultural enterprise was prophetic, except for his references to European classicism. He could not have imagined the extent to which our major contributions would be unequivocally modern, technological, and culturally diverse—that the American voice would be defined not by statuary, tapestry, and porcelain so much as by movies, theater, TV, and sound recordings that would blow the church doors off their hinges, making new messiahs out of rock stars and rock stars out of inventors.

In this sense, I think “The Star Spangled Banner” became truly American when Jimi Hendrix played his electric guitar solo version at Woodstock in 1969. Simultaneously patriotic and revolutionary, Hendrix’s tortured virtuoso (significantly instrumental and electric) synthesized the aristocratic and tight-assed “To Anacreon in Heaven” with the sins of racism, the self-betrayal of the Vietnam War, and the psychedelic explosion of counter-culture into a performance that told a much deeper, more painful, and more complex truth in the American-born language of rock-and-roll. This sound, which would not exist without the American slave diaspora, traveled back across the Atlantic, helped bring the children of WWII out of the rubble, and was even returned to its own roots by a new “English invasion” of the United States. This produced an artist like Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS, and whose recording of “We Will Rock You” has been the unofficial anthem of every NFL game for years.

In a 2016 documentary about world-famous photographer Harry Benson, called Harry Benson: Shoot First, the artist discusses a photograph he took in Vietnam depicting a pair of wheelchair-bound veterans shaking hands—one American the other Vietnamese. Benson tells us that the Vietcong vet said to his former enemy, “We used to sneak up on your positions in the dark, not to kill you, but to listen to your music.” If that doesn’t say something about where our better angels live, I’m not sure what does.